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The probably final RC before Slackware 14.0 shipped has been announced. Most bug fixes and requests that has been sent to Patrick has been included on this release, notably the /etc/os-release from Ruario to ease him detecting OS being used by the reporter, a new default group in adduser, rtc_cmos module unloaded at boot time, generated ISO images do not conform to ECMA199 standard, updated mirror list for upcoming Slackware 14.0, XOrg's build parameter has been updated to include "Slackware 14.0 Slackware Linux Project" string, and many others.

Some packages gets an upgrade, such as Linux Kernel 3.2.28, Apache 2.4.3, e2fsprogs, mc, powertop, sqlite, gdb, nasm, perl, dhcp, netatalk, php, samba, and gnuplot. Most of them are now at the latest version.

Overall, most bug reports (old and new) has been fixed on this round of update. Please test once again to make sure Slackware 14.0 is fit enough to be released to public.

Patrick Volkerding has announced RC 2 for the upcoming Slackware 14.0. As always, it includes a lot of bug fixes and suggestions from previous RC 1 release. It's getting closer and right now, it's basically a frozen and no new feature will be added unless it's very important and doesn't contain known regressions.

What's new on this RC 2? Here are list of packages that gets upgraded along with the new version numberNew Kernel 3.2.27Bash 4.2.037Btrfs-progs-20120810Coreutil-8.18Smartmontools-5.43usb_modeswitch-1.2.4RPM 4.10mpg123-1.14.4lxc-0.7.5ccache-3.1.8amaroK 2.6.0db48liblastfm-1.0.1phonon-gstreamer-4.6.2GnuTLS-3.0.22wget-1.14Scim-1.4.14Audacious-3.3.1geeqie-1.1
I'm quite surprised that Pat decided to put a lot of packages for this RC, but all is good and i think Slackware 14 will not be out of date for quite a long time. Most of the packages included are already at the latest stable version.

Patrick Volkerding received a tremendous bug reports after announcing Slackware 14.0 Beta and he compiled all those bug reports and fixed them in private along with the Core Team. When he sees it ready for public, it's time to release thus Slackware 14 RC1 has been announced.

Slackware 14 RC1 contains most of the fixes that has been proposed or suggested by users, mostly in LQ forum as you can see the credit in the ChangeLog. It also upgraded to the latest stable Linux Kernel 3.2.26 and KDE 4.8.5 along with some GTK+ related libraries.

Networking areas also being given high priority on this update as some of the packages are being rebuilt to fix some issues, namely ModemManager, network-scripts, openssl, wireless-tools, and wicd.

Lastly, the minimalist WM also has been rebuilt to fix compatibility issues with new D-Bus service.

GDisk has been renamed to gptfdisk and it now includes two new programs: cgfdisk, which is a menu driven GPT fdisk
similar to cfdisk, and fixparts, a tool for repairing corrupted GPT tables. Please first install gptfdisk, then followed by removing gdisk and optionally just to be safe, reinstall gptfdisk again.

lm_sensors has been upgraded to the latest version as well as the kernel-firmware and xf86-video-nv. The old WM has been rebuilt to fix conflict with XDM.

Finally, after being requested in LQ, Pat decided to add icu4c into Slackware-Current and this will enable him to build kexi in Calligra suite. This batch of update also upgrade poppler to 0.20.2, the minimum version which is required to have Okular to save a PDF including its annotations according to Eric on his blogpost about KDE 4.9.0.

Several other packages are rebuilt due to patches here and there such as util-linux, mysql, calligra, okular, and tumbler. Two packages are upgraded: cups and libwpg.

Java SlackBuild is also rebuilt to fix a typo in the code which resulted in dangling symlink

KDE Team has released the arrival of KDE 4.9, their flagship product towards KDE 5 which will be released next year. KDE 4.9 has many improvements in many areas, but notably in Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and in the Platform.

As the packagers gets early access to the KDE source tarballs, they can make packages quickly, and sometimes they released it just few minutes after the official announcement. The same situation happened on Slackware, where Eric Hameleers, one of the Slackware Core Team is also a KDE packagers for Slackware Linux. He has built KDE 4.9 for Slackware-Current users and upload it on his KTown repository.

The poll has been running for two months and it's time to announce the results. Two months ago i asked about the Slackware's main web site existence. Is it important for you (Slackware users) or not? Here are the results:

It's really important. It must be online all the time 84 (48%)
As long as the ChangeLog is updated, it's not that important for me 62 (35%)
I don't really visit the website so often 24 (13%)
Others (give your answer in the comments area) 3 (1%)
It seems that almost half of the voters said that it's important. Some others said that it doesn't matter since they can read the ChangeLog in any mirror sites.
Nevertheless, the main website has been brought back and moved to a new server and hopefully we won't have those kind of problem in short time.
Time to start a new poll which will be added shortly